ME/CFS & Fibromyalgia Awareness Day

I wish I had time to go into how important this is and how many people are impacted by these medical conditions, but I only have a few minutes to write now. Hopefully I’ll be able to drop back in later and give you better information, but I was on my way to bed and wanted to take just a moment to put this out there while there’s still time for someone to read it and show their support. 🙂

Many people with ME/CFS also suffer from fibromyalgia – they often go hand in hand. Fibromyalgia is a disorder that causes widespread musculoskeletal pain along with cognitive issues, fatigue, sleep disruption and memory problems. The list of symptoms for fibro is lengthy (although not as lengthy as an 18 page symptom list I’ve read for ME/CFS) and varies from person to person, but can include IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), migraine headaches, neuralgia (severe nerve pain) and odd things such as allodynia – hyper-sensitive skin. The most recent one I’ve been dealing with is neuralgia and it can be pretty horrific.

I wish I had more time to add some good links of information and go into the struggle of trying to live with these conditions in this post… however, my point of writing this was to ask you to please show your support. Many may not know that you’re supporting anything and you may not even have the opportunity to explain to anyone, but someone out there will probably notice and be grateful… As with most “Awareness” days May 12th has a color scheme. 🙂 Wearing something blue shows support for ME/CFS and wearing something purple shows support for fibro. I really needed a blue and purple striped shirt since I have both, but I’ll probably go with blue since the ME/CFS has taken more of a toll on me.

I would personally like to thank you for just taking the time to read this. It’s hard enough to live like this and even more difficult when I’m misunderstood because of it. Speaking out is the only way to educate people and dispel the misconceptions. I choose not to be silent. I hope you will too.